Google's New Business Plan: Pray For Leap Year

Comscore measures paid clicks for US users of all the major search engines. Google has recently been on a fairly big slide in paid clicks. Google investors were hoping to see some improvement in January's 0 percent increase in year-over-year performance. The good news? Paid clicks were up 3% in February. The bad news? There were 3% more days in February this year.

Google had 515mm US paid clicks in February, which is up only 3% year over year. At first glance, this appears to be a slight--slight--improvement from the horrific January report, which was flat y/y at 532mm clicks. However, Comscore did not adjust for the Leap Year (29 days vs 28), so this likely accounted for the entire increase.* Both months show a severe slowdown from Q4:

Our source believes Wall Street was looking for 5%-7% growth in Google's US paid clicks and that this report will likely cause the stock to trade down. For basic queries (versus paid clicks), Google US was up 31% and Google International was up 31%.